I was born in Missouri one month after my parents bought several acres near the edge of town with a mineral spring on it. This was 1929, and the town had no good water supply so the spring was a thriving business. Soon the town dug deep wells, and the spring water was no longer needed. But the spring was still the center of our lives.

It flowed through a beautiful ravine into the pasture watering our animals and irrigating our large garden. One of my earliest jobs was to run to the spring to get a jug of water. My dad was a nature lover and taught us kids all about the trees and flowers on the hills and creek and woodlands of our property.

I grew up during the Depression, and after graduating from high school I went to Saint Mary College in Leavenworth, Kansas, run by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth. After my freshman year, I felt called to become a Sister of Charity and entered the convent in 1948. At that time the novitiate training was two years. Many young women were entering religious life at that time. Our days were filled with work and prayer and song. I was very happy.

After my profession of vows, I was assigned to teach in parochial schools in Missouri and Kansas for the next 16 years. I loved teaching but in the mid ’60s I was assigned to help out in two of the orphanages run by the Sisters:. three summers in Helena and one in Denver. This was very exciting for me because my heart had always been drawn to the mountains. In 1966 I was assigned to St. Vincent Home in Topeka, Kan., to be the child-care worker for the boys department. I had the care of 14 boys from ages 3 to 14, 24/7. I got to be a mom, and I loved it.

Two years later, with a newly trained director, we recognized that the children being placed in the home needed more than custodial care; and with the guidance of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, we changed the program to a treatment center for children and youth. We had male workers and recreational staff, and I became the child-care mother for the adolescent unit of eight boys from 12 to 18 years old. After 11 years in this work, I knew l was beginning to burn out. With the encouragement of some of my friends, l, an incurable workaholic, asked for a year off, a sabbatical year to find God in the wilderness.

A friend who was a teacher in one of our community schools in Butte told me about a rustic cabin 10 miles outside of town in the mountains owned by the Sisters at St. James Hospital. She sent me the floor plan and it seemed perfect, except there was no way to heat it but a fireplace. Some of the officers of the community visited it to see if some renovations could be made, and they said it was not fit for human habitation. They had a contractor examine it, and he said it was situated on a spring, was sinking, and advised them to not put any improvements in it.

As soon as I heard it was on a spring, I felt in my heart it was the place I was supposed to be.

On Aug. 15, 1977, I arrived in Butte from Kansas in an old Ford Falcon my parents had given me. It was loaded down with all sorts of things I thought I might be able to use, such as a sewing machine, half cans of paint, tools, nails and fabric. I found the cabin on my own, and when I took the shutters off the windows I could hardly believe my eyes. The living room was paneled in knotty pine and furnished with old, but sturdy hospital furniture. There was a tiny bedroom off one side and a tiny kitchen off the other. The width of the front of the cabin was a screened-in porch. It has the potential to become my dream home.

The cabin was in a deep canyon surrounded by aspen, pine and willows with a tiny stream that gurgled right through it. The outhouse was across the stream and up the hill a bit.

At that time, there were still many sisters doing work in the hospital, schools and pastoral ministry in Butte. I stayed with the sisters in Walkerville until I got the cabin cleaned and habitable, which took two weeks. One of the scariest things I encountered was a pack rat that lived in the wood cellar under the porch. He had carried off dozens of mushrooms I had drying on racks in the front yard. He was not intimidated by me, but I was of him.

We had a cold snap at the end of August, and there was ice on my windshield. The fireplace was beautiful, but totally inefficient. In the mornings as I meditated, I practically had to crawl into it to find warmth. The toothpaste was so hard and cold, I could barely get it out of the tube.

I sent an SOS to my friends in Colorado who owned a ghost town. They came to my rescue with a potbelly stove and stayed almost a week helping me winterize the cabin. We went up to the highlands and brought down several truckloads of timber. We built a bridge over the stream to the outhouse and stairs from the wood cellar up to the porch through a trap door in the floor. The pack rat vacated, and I was glad to see him go.

After they left, I still spent endless days cutting up the logs with a chain saw, splitting the wood and then stacking more than six cords of fire wood floor to ceiling in the cellar. I built a coal bin in one corner and ordered a ton of coal. Having never been in Montana in the wintertime, I worked feverishly to get all the preparations finished before really cold weather set in.

Despite all the necessary manual labor, I did not shirk my goal of spending hours in daily prayer and exploring the wilderness surrounding the cabin. I actually found the little spring on the mountainside above the cabin that fed the little stream. I built shelving in the cabin and decorated the outhouse with the leftover cans of paint I had brought. It became known as the Rainbow Room, or the fanciest outhouse west of the Mississippi.

One Sunday afternoon, another sister and I drove to the Wise River area to gather nature media for my craft work. While I was gone, some vandals broke into the cabin and stole a lot of my equipment. It was then that I knew I needed to redeem the gift certificate to the Butte Animal Shelter, which my boys from the home had given me as a going-away present. I found my trusted friend, an older yellow Lab puppy named Bucko, who then accompanied me on all my hikes.

Bucko ran miles around me so I didn’t get to see much of the wildlife that I knew was there from the scat I found. I even named one mountain I climbed regularly Moose Turd Mountain because it was obvious the moose spent lots of time there.

It is hard to describe the spiritual growth, with which I was blest during that wonderful year. During my prayer, God gave me the mantra, JUST BE WITH THE SPRING. It had many meanings to me and continues to be important to the present.

I moved to Helena where I worked in home health and as the first chaplain for the Hospice of St. Peter’s Hospital until I became a social worker for Catholic Social Services in adoption. I worked in that blessed profession for 21 wonderful years, being intimately involved in the lives of birth and adoptive families in well over 250 adoptions.

Now as an active retiree, I volunteer with the home visitors of the Lewis and Clark Health Department. Since I found my soul, in a very special way, when I came to Montana, I happily call Helena home. Being here is especially meaningful since the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth have been ministering continuously in Helena since 1869. And I am part of that legacy.